


Fashion

by RoryKurago



Category: Tales of Arcadia (Cartoons)
Genre: 100 Themes Challenge, Child Soldiers, Eating, Gen, Training
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-08
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-14 16:07:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29919405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoryKurago/pseuds/RoryKurago
Summary: Nomura learned early to armour herself in the sharp edges of lives lost.Nomura Niko, potter's daughter, was born in 1673 in a mountain village beyond everything except the Shogunate. Nomura Niko, Changeling, arrived in the summer, when all the doors and windows of the house were thrown open.She was young to be placed out. She forgot, in this dreamy life, that she was not Nomura Niko.She had time to love her human parents before they were executed.
Relationships: Draal/Nomura (Tales of Arcadia)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 15
Collections: Rory's 100 Themes Writing Challenge





	Fashion

**Author's Note:**

> 100 themes: #43 - Fashion  
> This is not the story I set out to write, but here it is, so here we go! This is also the longest I've ever sat on a completed story.

The greatest absurdity to Nomura was a tourmaline troll having a broken heart. Tourmaline healed. Her many lives had taught her that there was no sense in mending broken things; they might be more beautiful for the breaking, but nothing could make them what they were.

Time broke her into pieces, so she armoured herself by turning the sharp edges outward. She fashioned herself from all the best pieces—the hardiest, the brightest. The most painful.

She was among the last of the final wave of Changelings: a dying breed after Morgana’s defeat at Killahead. Gone were the days of Changelings formed of adult trolls who agreed to a half-life—a Faustian exchange of pariahdom for the freedom of human faces. Now trolflings were snatched from nurseries and raised to it.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

**1\. A Corner Of Nowhere  
**

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . **  
**

Nomura Niko was born in 1673 in a mountain village beyond everything except the Shogunate. Nomura Niko, Changeling, arrived in the summer, when all the doors and windows of the house were thrown open, and village labourers stripped to the waist to work. Her parents were a potter and a painter.

Niko-Who-Never-Had-A-Trollish-Name was stolen as a stone seed from a market half a world from the _ichiba_ where the heartstone pulsed milky green instead of neon blue, and the air was sweet even underground. She never consented to becoming a Changeling. It never occurred to her that anyone might have asked.

She was young to be placed out; too young, wiser minds would say. Eyes still dark; first set of fangs. She hadn’t learned that humans were abominable wrecks, that they wasted the gift of the aboveground. She had time to love her human parents before they were executed.

Her human father was an artisan of proto-Tobe ware: ice white with gauzy blue like an inverted sky. Her mother painted the most exquisite stories and mended broken things with gold. These were the broad strokes that opened the door to love.

What brought the changeling through it were smaller things:

Mother blowing on noodles before bringing them to the babe’s mouth.

Father making figures in her likeness. An army of porcelain friends. (Mother soothing her when the village children threw stones.)

Father playing a small drum while Mother combed Niko’s hair and sang. Stories, songs ancient for her species. Lullabies. Kingdoms under the mountains.

Young Niko watched clouds reflected in the pool by the house and associated the ripples with the ululations of Mother’s voice. The creak of the waterwheel in the stream overtook the crack of stone. (Her short martial training dimmed in memory as she grew older above ground.)

In repayment that she didn’t realise was love, Niko carried buckets of water with trollish strength when Mother’s monthlies came too fiercely; worked Father’s clay in secret. It flowed more smoothly then. Likewise, a touch of trollish magic made Mother’s _kintsugi_ shine more brightly. Helped the golden fusing hold. 

How could she know it for love? She had never seen it done.

Nomura Niko, Changeling, had been placed with a potter and a painter because they were favoured artisans of the _daimyo_. Several times a year, he visited to view his new commissions. He liked to leave his guards at a distance and take tea on the Nomuras’ veranda, admiring trinkets this from angle and that.

The close green forest was lulling. The shush of water through rocks, the creak of the waterwheel driving Father’s pottery table: balm to a beleaguered mind. The older he grew, the longer he stayed. The further away the guards loitered. The lower their spears.

Niko’s job, she had been told by a shadow across the stream, was to ensure that her parents work remained of incomparable quality and the _daimyo_ remained at ease here. She took this as impetus to learn pottery from Father and continue reinforcing Mother’s goldwork. In all her years, she ate only one villager: a mouthy boy who talked of running away to be a warrior. He followed the changeling into the forest with intent to make her regret laughing. They never found the clothes she buried. Everyone sighed that he’d finally run.

For the greater sum of the changeling’s days, she was Good.

Daughter. Dumpling. She forgot, in this dreamy life, that she was not Nomura Niko.

The seasonal visit of the shadow in the fifteenth year was accompanied by new orders. Niko knelt by the stream and nodded. The heaviness in her fleshly chest had no meaning. She only knew it hadn’t been there before.

When next the _daimyo_ visited, she brought a tea service out to the veranda, then a tray of trinkets, and then knelt close and drew a knife across his throat. She saved the tea from his arterial spray. The old man’s chin folded to his chest in an attitude of deep contemplation. Down the hill, guards lounged at ease among the rocks, chewing reeds.

Niko drank what was in the teacup. Then she glided noiselessly away to pack. She prided herself on practicality: only the necessities. Later, she couldn’t rightly say how a prized silk robe of Mother’s and a brick of Father’s favoured tea came to be included. She was gone from the village long before the shout of discovery.

Father received the blame, of course. For the fault of not raising his daughter correctly if not for killing the _daimyo_ himself. He was beheaded. Mother chose to die with him. Niko heard so later from a kappa.

Niko found a farmer wandered too far afield to console herself, and didn’t bother to bury the clothes. The fullness of her stomach didn’t abate the sting in her chest. Far from the temporary human ailment she had supposed, it grew worse the further she travelled. When she met the kappa, she heard a crack and the pain grew worse.

She wasn’t supposed to care about the fate of her ‘parents’.

Yet word travelled fast in the underground. The _ichiba_ was abuzz when she arrived. She hid away in a corner of a hot spring and heard how a new ruler had already been installed. Her private pocket of nowhere had a new lord. A trollish puppet. (Bent to pliancy before elevation by treasures of the underground.)

She hadn’t been aware this was the plan; she’d done as she was told. That didn’t cut her. What did were the titters at how readily the humans turned on their own. They’d hung the bodies outside the palace walls to decay as a warning.

She was appalled at how hearing it turned her stomach. Afraid of how powerful the urge to burst through the steam and crash the gossips’ head together. She didn’t know where it came from, this need to bellow that Father had been a quiet, kind man who never deserved a cut throat (not on his hollow daughter’s behalf). And that Mother had hands more precious than gold, and a diamond spine inside her fleshy softness.

Niko swallowed the compulsions with a hefty dose of self-disgust and slunk out of the water to find a tavern.

“She said you would be a vicious marvel,” a shadow whispered from an alley as she passed. Taller and less rotund than the shadow at the stream, but familiar: yellow eyes pressed into crescents of mirth. “The Pale Lady. Vell done, Niko Two-Lakes. …Or is it Two- _Lives_ , now? Your body count begins to rise.”

She lashed out. He vanished—dashed away through the steam. Her claws struck granite and lodged.

In her accommodations, she found a Roman coin in her sleep nest: a single head with two faces. She cracked it savagely between her fangs and swallowed. No more was she a half-formed stone seed to be frightened and intimidated into compliance.

Still, the Whisper-man’s congratulations forced a troublesome point: lingering in this corner of trollheim put her at risk of unmasking herself. Her tainting. She had controlled her instinct in the _onsen_ by a hair. Better she found an elsewhere to be before the whispers came again.

Her assignment was complete. She didn’t linger to let gossip twist the knife.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

**2\. Gebel Zabara**

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . **  
**

With no friends to guard her treasures, she took her bundle (the secret silk and tea buried deep within) and left by Gyre. Several random turns took her someplace nobody knew her.

The heartstone of the _khen_ was green with a clarity like still water, and a vibrance to rival the _recova_ ’s. It reminded her of home. She sought out fighting lessons just for a reason to stay. Eventually the whispers would find her, but not yet.

In the _khen_ , every teacher who might instruct on the combat arts insisted the student make their own weapons. Of various local styles, Nomura chose one hooked like an eye. The khopesh she made of iron were clumsy, uneven – like herself – but by the third working, they passed for training weapons. Her teacher seemed satisfied.

He asked her name while she lay wheezing and hazy after a session.

“Nomura Niko,” she gasped. Self-hatred came instantly. How could she so brazenly trot out their name? But they were dead. They weren’t using it.

“Nomuran’iko. You will do well. Be here tomorrow at Sixth Hour.”

She owed her fleshy parents at least something. “Niko,” she grated. “Just Niko.”

By the time the whispers located her, she had wrung respect from the Old One’s ancient basalt. Yet she shied from returning the small affection that came with it. In their time of training, she had finally chiselled the flaws from her nature. She could not, would not allow herself to be corroded again.

Her orders were to leave immediately for the _ichiba_. This time she offered the Whisper-man a jagged grin to match his own.

Nomura Niko, potter and painter’s daughter, had allowed too much humanity. She’d cracked along its seams. Time away from humans had helped her to see them for the meat-pillows they were.

Fragile. Food. A face that she could wear.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

**3\. Kyoto**

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . **  
**

By now her human body had grown deft and lovely: hair like obsidian, mouth of cinnabar. To match it, she returned to the _recova_ of her seeding and scoured it for splinters of tangerine quartz large enough to form khopesh. These she brought back to the _khen_ for grinding.

“No more trolfling, I see,” leered the weapon-wright. “A proper trollmaid with blood-pullers to match.”

Niko bared her fangs and snatched the finished khopesh. “We shall see.”

Noguchi Niko reappeared in Kyoto as a painter and musician to bewitch a minor noble. She took only a fat fisherman far from city limits to slake her taste for flesh. She contented herself with strips of him dried like salt-fish from a box in her sitting room. The khopesh, she displayed with youthful arrogance above her sleeping platform. These city folk considered themselves too erudite and urbane to believe peasant folklore. Who among the blind would see them for trollish artefacts?

Yet the true target of the display was Niko herself. She needed the reminder. She had never had a trollish name, so she’d kept ‘Niko’ out of practicality. Practicality, though, couldn’t explain her inability to part with Mother’s robe; or the absent-minded seeking of Father’s tea in the fine houses of the hospitality district. She had done her best to smother all memory of being loved by them, but it clung, throbbing behind her ribs like a canker. At odd moments her heart ached, as of splinters grinding against each other as she moved. If she could open her own stone, she wondered, and take out the tourmaline seed at her core, would it be bright or clouded with fissures? Trolls didn’t bruise, but they could fracture.

One thing she did embrace was the unjustness of her parents’ death. In quiet moments as the months drew out and her target evaded her attentions, she picked at that mental sore until it stung and wept. Then she would go hunting. For a time, more than cats and canaries went missing in the streets around her domicile.

She reviled the humans for how easily they turned on their own. That pain was worth keeping: it kept her sharp and untrusting. It would keep her alive. Still, she kept that robe, buried in the fine crepes and linens of a fashionable woman, and cursed herself for whistling her father’s work songs as she painted.

She thought she was ruined when her lordling happened to stroll by as she scolded herself one warm afternoon—but the coarse words made her real to him. Gave her dimension. Pulled him in. Humans, she learned, loved the improper and profane as much as they loved to publicly revile it. It was opiate. She leaned into the corruption.

He was easily beguiled after that: her father’s deft finger-work, her mother’s fine designs.

He became her patron, and then her lover. Courtly, of course. Chastely. She never allowed him to have his way. The tease of it made him ardent, but that wasn’t her purpose, nor was repulsion at human mating rituals. She had to work to conceal how the smell of him gathered saliva in her mouth in a very different carnal way. It titillated her how close he came several times to helping himself to a strip of fisherman from the lacquer box on the sideboard. Fool.

Despite her coy delaying, he brought her gifts. Brass trinkets, baubles of fine lacquer. Perfumes and preserved flowers from the Caribbean. Murano glassware. This last was among the few she didn’t eat as soon as he was gone.

He laid it down before her as goblin presenting a new-stolen babe to their master. It was a bowl, blue and white like the sky. Niko was appalled at the wrench her heart gave. She knelt with hands in her sleeves while he lifted it gently so she could see the pattern. Clouds reflected on a pond. Ice white and gauzy blue.

She wanted to kill him for the audacity.

Death had never been the purpose of this placement so far as Niko understood, although she hadn’t been enlightened the first time either. The lordling proposed and she was ordered to accept. The ensuing family exile for marrying a common artisan was eclipsed by his assassination during a coup for a government position. This job would have taken him—them into the antechambers of power. That, as it turned out, had been the ultimate destination for Noguchi Niko, Changeling.

Noguchi Niko, widow to a dead social climber, was nobody. Her failure – ironically, to protect – was viewed dimly by her master.

After she collapsed the life of Noguchi Niko and returned to the _ichiba_ , feigning new arrival from Brazil, she was greeted with disappointment and derision from the Order. The Whisper-Man came to her in daylight as a plump Dutch trader, crowing with perverse delight unhidden by his conveyance of the Mistress’ disappointment. The ground quartz eyeglasses he wore must surely have been an affectation. Equally high was the probability that revealing his fleshy face was impatience rather than art.

Intellectual superiority didn’t give Niko back the high ground, but it made her feel better. She retreated to her human house in a sulk to regroup. In her absence, her husband’s family had sent their servants.

The lordling’s accommodations had been cleaned out, apparently under the misapprehension that everything he had owned now belonged to the family as recompense for the shame of dishonour. Everything his wife had owned as well.

They had taken the bowl.

She told herself she slaughtered every soul in their rural estate out of boredom. Pique. That she was only venting her frustration over the Order blaming her for the cupidity of flesh-bags.

But when she found herself in a receiving room decorated in celestial blues, white, silver, and there was her bowl as if it had always belonged to them, the bloodthirst petered out. Satiated. She’d done what she came to accomplish.

She didn’t bother to eat the bodies or dispatch the stragglers who fell away from her in horror on the way out. Neither burning nor burying was warranted in this case. Let them witness the carnage. Let them see the ravages of their own hollow hearts, and wonder at the lesson of it.

Let them turn on each other and savage their own pitiful kingdoms.

She wrapped the bowl in the fragile silk of her mother’s robe and paid two gold nuggets to store it in a permanent vault beneath the _ichiba_.

Murano glass. Nomura Niko. Perhaps if she could forget the weight of it – the way it slid against her claws and the translucency of light passing through it – the past would finally let her free.

Her time was her own for the moment, according to the Whisper-Man’s chortling exit. The Order was disgusted with her and she had no new assignment. What a wonderful opportunity to disappear into the space between worlds. She took her khopesh and bowed out.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

**4\. Venice**

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . **  
**

In Venice, she had her trollish skin buffed to a glassy finish. It was a trick of local craftspeople, the one she found a chimeric demidolphin who chirruped a worksong of change as she smoothed Niko’s stone. It hardly hurt.

“New look for a new life,” the chimera trilled with a wink as Niko climbed out of a lagoon turned pink with her shed skin. Niko paid the creature with a desert beryl and resumed her human form.

It was now 1752 and her eyes had begun greening through their black. She was coming of age. The bowl that slaughtered a clan was Venetian glass, from an island called Murano. The letters. The colours. For lack of more compelling plan, she had taken it for a sign and followed the trail.

The glasswork was unlike anything in Nippon. Human art dealers and traders outside the empire claimed Murano was in the high sun of fashion for the West. Limiting her footprint in trollheim would grant more lead time before the whispers found her. She tracked the mysterious glass overland to its font.

In Venice, she had no need to be a craftswoman. A tidily-kept trollish hoard made her a Lady: foreigner, patron, student of the arts. She eschewed the non-human community in favour of dresses of her own brilliant tourmaline purple and green, moving among the humans as one of them, beside herself with mirth at their shallow depravities.

She flattered herself that she was becoming quite adept at lying. The delicate artifice of her persona needed no protection. Unlike in Kyoto, she took no pains to carry her hungers beyond the lagoon. She stole sleepy gondoliers from their cushions and enticed tender young things from their prayers on their way home from Mass. Nightly she fed on them while by day she devoured their arts.

Her fleshling face was worn the way humans masqueraded to each other. It was, even objectively, lovely. Supported by a persona seductively repulsive, carnivorous (taboo and dimension) she was irresistible to the humans of the lagoon. She was more subtle with her humanity than in Kyoto, but more overt with the manipulation of it.

Artists were slaves to beauty. How could they not love her?

The khopesh lay quiet, spelled into hiding as bracelets. There was little trollish presence here, and provided she cleaned up after feeding, she slipped by non-humans unnoticed. A thing of no world.

Too quickly it grew dull. Off the back of another party, she visited the workshop of a favourite craftswoman. Not hands of gold, quite, but perhaps polished brass. Dark hair and eyes. A stern spirit beneath the smile. She was, perhaps, the one person in the city that Niko wouldn’t have eaten given the chance.

Celina claimed to enjoy Niko’s visits. Her young offspring, less so.

As he fled, he dashed a bowl prepared for packaging from the shelf. Viridian splintered across the floor. Celina gasped: it would be costly to purchase pigment for an equal piece.

Niko knelt to gather the fragments. Heat prickled in her eyes. Celina had managed such a particular green. Niko was unable to prevent seeing memory in each shard:

Reeds waving in a pond below the veranda. Mother’s best robe. The reflection of her own eyes in polished brass as she strolled from a noble house, robes soaking up the blood of a massacre.

Before Niko was a murderess, Mother used to gather up the pieces of broken things and seal them together with gold. Niko told herself it was satirical to introduce ideas to humans just to see their minds implode. She convinced herself this was the motive for returning the bowl intact the next day.

She refused to explain how it was done, and snarled openly at a plea to demonstrate. How could she explain? Show? How, when the hands which had shaken so badly she near cut herself as she gathered the pieces had steadied only upon sinking into memories of a human who had never been her mother?

Venice had already pried too much from her. In spite of her, the human world had gotten too close.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

**5\. Brazil**

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . **  
**

The nearest market to Venice was in the Tyroles. Niko tried to make a temporary home there, but the trolls were largely granite, dolomite, gneiss. Drab and stubborn. The _marcià_ ’s heartstone was likewise: smoky quartz, its glow a dull grey like the rainiest dawn above ground. Niko could feel herself sinking into the sleepy apathy that afflicted the longest-term residents.

Nowhere before had she felt the pull of the ground so strongly. The lulling suggestion of simply lying down, going to sleep, letting the earth take her back, was in every exhalation.

The young locals didn’t seem to feel it – the dragging ache doused with grog and epic tales of past glory – but Niko did.

“So, Niko Two-Lives—” drawled a voice as she trudged back to her cave after a lacklustre combat session.

The Whisper-Man barely ducked the khopesh which embedded in the tunnel at neck height.

“My apologies,” he said smartly. “Niko _Two-Hundred_ -Lives. Your legend grows. So, at last you have found your way to my home. You save me much trouble, _fräulein_ ; now I will not have to look for you when there is work to be done. Perhaps introductions are in order, if we are to be neighbours.” He snapped an arm across his chest and dipped a shallow bow. “You may call me Otto.”

The good village girl in Niko barely held off an instinctive responding bow. Disgusting, how the conditioning persisted.

“You live here?” she growled.

He gave the unpleasant smile of something peering up from a shower drain. “All my lives. How long can we expect you to stay? I must introduce you to my mate.”

“Don’t trouble yourself. I’m leaving tomorrow.”

She left that night, by Gyre. This time she let sentiment drive her path.

The _recova_ was as she remembered—livelier even. No minus that it was nearly as far from the Tyroles as a troll could get. There was music and boozing and storytelling in the _recova_ as in the _marcià_ , but they were new stories, new songs. Here was chaotic life: fizzy, ever-changing, and loud enough to drown out the past. She dove in deep.

Niko Murano was, objectively, a lovely troll, emphasised by the glassy polish. She actively cultivated that image. It had a tendency to lull males into foolish wagers which allowed near-boundless entertainment without herself buying more than a single flagon of grog per night.

It wasn’t a subtle trap, intentionally. She was taking a break from ‘subtle’. She was also taking a break from sliding through the shadows. The Order hadn’t found her. But they had made her; eventually, they always found her. Only a fool would think she was free. She might as well enjoy what passed for freedom whilst it was at hand.

This was the mindset in which she entered her third night of outdrinking a quartzite monolith who couldn’t, from his braying boasts, be more than two centuries older than herself. She was careful, always, to slide in and challenge this one only after he had been in his cups a while. The trolfling was significantly larger than herself, and a hardier breed. She never challenged him directly, either: all her work was in careful posturing in his eyeline, a smirk, a careless turning-away.

On this night, she had scarcely set hoof in the cantina before he was on his feet at her usual table bellowing for a rematch. She’d arrived late—or he’d come early. There was no way to slither out of it.

She lost. Violently. Then she lost the next two cycles regurgitating anything she ate or drank. In quiet admission, she privately ceded that cantina to him and found another.

She underestimated the trolfling. After several quiet nights, he sat down across from her with two flagons and a smirk.

“Unless you were beaten sorely enough last time…”

Niko had thought about this moment. Lifting her hooves, she crossed them elegantly on the table, kicking the flagons back at him. As expected, his eyes dropped to the slick smoothness of her leg—angled invitingly toward him.

Niko offered a smirk of her own and laid a khopesh across her lap. “How about a change of pace?”

They drank before the fight to keep it interesting. This was Niko’s stipulation, and strategy. He might have been able to drink her into the ground, but she lost the ability to fight a lot further down the scale of intoxication than him, and she was quick. It only took a few drunken bouts to prove it.

Graciously, tipsily, she agreed to leave the blades aside if he would aid in developing her unarmed skills.

Only then did he ask her name.

This, Niko had not considered ahead of time. She could have kicked herself. She had been telling herself she was Niko Murano now, but in all her weeks at the _recova_ she had never needed to give a name. The trolfling seemingly hadn’t considered it worthwhile to ask before now.

‘Niko’ was a name she kept for herself: old and private. The first thing she’d had which was her own. She couldn’t remember being given a trollish name in the nursery; perhaps she’d been taken too young to have one. This trolfling had not earned the right to ‘Niko’.

She meant to tell him Murano.

“Nomura,” she rasped, and then blinked at him stupidly. Why had she said that? But she was committed now, and in the deepest fissures of her heart, she realised that no one alive other than the Order would know any significance of the name. Why shouldn’t she have that one thing for herself?

She leaned into the mistake. “The ones who survive call me Nomura.”

In the flush of warmth that suffused her to say it, she almost missed his smile.

“Nomura,” he repeated. “I am glad to know you.”

He didn’t—but she wanted him to. At least, she wanted him to know Nomura. Someone else had to remember.

She had taken a cave in a quiet side chasm where the bioluminescence was all blue and gold, and the screeching of abyssal worms in the river below came only quietly. The shushing water reminded her of wind in the forest; the distant thump of hammer on anvil of the waterwheel’s turn. Setting aside the danger of admitted she had never been able to truly kill Nomura Niko, potter’s daughter, it was easier to fall asleep here than anywhere she had ever resided.

The trolfling trotted along the ledge to her door at Seventh Hour. He was grinning again, sure that tonight he would trounce her now both were sober.

She put him down three of five bouts before they broke for lunch. As they rested, he told her how he came to be here, in the _recova_ , far from his famous father. (Because he was famous. Even Niko, raised far from trollheim, knew the tales of Kanjigar.)

Trolls of the _recova_ , Draal commented, fought differently than where he was from. Only by exposing himself to every style of combat could he effectively defeat them all.

“Sounds like quite a task laid out for you,” Niko—Nomura said contemplatively. He wasn’t incorrect (although he wasn’t doing splendidly at the ‘defeating’ portion of his plan).

He snorted with offence when she said as much. The resulting scuffle lasted several bouts through until dinnertime.

“You ought to visit the islands,” she told him as they tore through plates and a barrel of grog at the cantina. “If you really want to see them all.”

He sat back with a thinking scowl, so distracted he entirely forgot the flagon in his hand.

Training the next night was aborted in favour of a conversation more than half bullying in both directions. It ended with the pair shoulder-to-cheek with trolls and stranger critters at an arena in Chiang Rai trollmarket, bowls of spicy noodle soup with crunchy crickets and aluminium in their claws, howling at a demonstration fight between two local champions. 

When the fight card was over, they strolled out analysing that bout in particular.

“It was only in the last round that she really lost,” Nomura claimed.

“ _Bushigal_!” Draal declared. “The victor always had the superior style. He was stronger! Fiercer. He struck the more decisive blows.”

“Ha! The other was faster, and more intelligent with her strikes. It was poor footing that let him land a hit. That winded her.”

“An inexcusable error! She was deficient.”

“You’re deficient.”

The argument carried them back through the Gyre and to Nomura’s cavern. Draal left threatening that he would return the next day with evidence of the victor’s overall superiority.

He did came back. And Nomura declined to agree with his ‘evidence’. Again, they never made it to the arena. Spirited re-enactments consumed the night. Dawn found them exhausted and still debating. Nomura scarcely gave it a thought when Draal collapsed in an accommodating corner beside her nest rather than drag himself home.

She didn’t mean to let it pass without comment when this became habit. It happened while she was distracted. They trained themselves weary and then limped back for hot grog and exhausted themselves with post-fight analysis. By the time she noticed, it was custom. Too late to fuss.

He’d made a dent in the floor. He had a designated spot. Occasionally he went away, and she noticed his absence; or she made explorations into the lower reaches of the market and wished she’d brought him along. He was a diamond-headed braggart, but he was quick to identify the repairable flaws in a technique, and it made her snort to watch his attempts at sidling away from outraged trollmaids he’d courted and tired of. Against all odds, she liked him. And he could never know she was a Changeling.

But that was the trick of it: much like sinking into Nomura Niko, potter and painter’s daughter, the _recova_ was creepingly transmuting her into simply Nomura, trollmaid. She was forgetting.

She never meant to let it slip. The more time they spent together, the more attention he paid, and it was her own arrogance that let her forget that it was hot-headedness rather than stupidity which fuelled his recklessness. As they stretched after training one night, it happened: swapping stories of their younger days, Nomura related one dawn when she’d been forced to abandon an all-night winning streak on dice at a tavern and race home because the sun was rising.

This wasn’t damning in itself. What was fatal were the details that her mother was always up with the birds, and specifically on this day she was up to view the sunrise colours to more accurately paint them for the _daimyo_.

There were kooks in trollheim, and there were crazies. None of the stories Nomura had told depicted her mother in that light. Draal caught the mention of rising eagerly at dawn, and frowned.

Just like that, dreamtime was over.

Because they were always brutally honest, she told the truth of the why and how.

Because she loved him, against her own instincts, she told him without intent to violence.

That was the mistake she remembered later. That, and forgetting that as she was not Nomura Niko, human, she was equally not Nomura Niko, troll.

She didn’t fault him for trying to kill an Impure. She tried to killed him back.

Of all the scars he bore when she saw him again, many lives later, hers were the ugliest and most precarious.

He accused her of falsehood. She accused him of reacting this way only because he worried what Daddy would think. Did he ever have an opinion of his own?

He bellowed and launched at her like a daystar.

She didn’t stay to find out how long it took him to drag his mangled body up from the chasm back to the _recova_ and attract the attention of someone for aid.

While he recovered, she guessed what was coming and moved above ground.

In roundabout ways, she heard that Draal was moving rivers and mountains to find her—to wipe the stain of her from the Earth. Never overtly, of course. She only heard that he was constantly moving, restless, worse-tempered than usual. Likely the shame of not realising her true nature earlier was acid to his wounds. He would never, she supposed, willingly reveal that he had consorted for considerable time with a Changeling. It would be an unrecoverable blow to his warrior reputation.

She wondered briefly if his father was coming after her. Then she discarded the notion: Draal’s desire for worthiness would never allow him to admit to his father that he’d had a so-called threat to trollheim under his very snout for so long without realising.

Kanjigar or no, she slept more easily above ground. The only beings up there who would knife her in her sleep were humans and the Order.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

**6\. Arcadia**

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

It gave her time and space to think, if nothing else. And eat. But mainly think. For her final human persona, she took back her earliest name. Her first self. Nomura Niko completed a slow world tour: Cartagena, Corinth, Istanbul, Barcelona, Lisboa, Oxford, Oslo, Hanseoung—what would become Seoul.

Ultimately, she decided somewhere around Corinth, she had always been Nomura Niko. Everything stemmed from that: every break, every remoulding, every edge and smoothed off angle. Nomura Niko was the broken heart of it all.

In Hanseoung, she met specimens of her earliest human countrymen for the first time in years. She shared their tea, and cakes; sat in their entertaining rooms listening to their music; wore their fine, familiar robes. The force of longing for home took her unexpectedly.

She had never been one to weep – frail human trick – but she had to excuse herself from the musical appreciation evening the ambassador had invited her to and go into the garden to compose herself.

She had learned to be harsh on herself, and so she examined herself deeply. ‘Home’. Could she stand it? Even by her own fiercest metric, she thought she could. She was ready. They would remember her in Shikoku, she judged, but perhaps not in Kyoto.

It wasn’t what she’d thought. Things were rough in this new economy. It was the late 1800’s, and the world was shrinking as it grew—brassy train lines, oceanliners, telegrams and airships. The home she’d left had become monastic. The trollmarket below it stagnated.

It was impossible to avoid rehashing stories of herself from lifetimes so far gone that even trolls she recognised from those days didn’t recognise her in return. She’d come far from the fresh, dark thing she was then. Returning to the _ichiba_ brought a fresh heaviness to the ache she thought she had long left behind. She restrained herself from going back to the mountain village. If she couldn’t stomach the _ichiba_ , her childhood home would be death.

The Old World had nothing left for her. She left it. Expansions in the West were ever-growing. She let the light and far horizons capture her and pull her along with them. In the New World, she began underground again. She ventured cautiously but without fear, thinking surely, surely, this was far enough in space and time to be new territory.

Perhaps it was the exile, or perhaps the truculent humans, but the trolls of New Jersey were rough enough to drive her above ground in short order.

Yet Nomura discovered she didn’t mind: the New World was new in all ways to her.

The Old World still found ways to catch up. Otto Scaarbach was waiting on a bench in the New York museum. His doughy fleshform was unchanged, the glasses a pince-nez now. He seemed to relish her recoil.

“Miss Nomura. You’ve taken your time. I trust you had a good trip.”

“Otto.” She kept her voice neutral, but the question was starker for its absence: What are you doing here?

Otto stood with a briskness that belied his corpulence. He produced an envelope and a pair of driving gloves from his coat pocket. “I have tickets for the opera tonight. I hope you’ll join me. It’s a Danish piece. Our mutual friends say it’s quite good. These are the best seats in the house.”

He proffered the envelope and smiled beatifically when she pinched it between fingernails as if pulling a splinter.

“Doors open at seven o’clock sharp,” he said in clipped tones. “Do join me at the bar beforehand for a drink.” Clicking his heels, he doffed his hat and strolled away, every inch the banker savouring a touch of culture on his lunch break.

Nomura found it difficult to enjoy the museum’s collection after that.

The best seats in the house were a private box, quite near the stage. They were able to look down over the stage and all the humans gazing raptly up at it. Nomura had come in magenta velvet and ostrich feathers: slinky enough to be distracting, but with a devilish slit up one leg. The message was clear: I am dangerous, in all ways.

The Whisper-man didn’t seem to notice. “ ‘ _Peer Gynt_ is a Danish masterpiece’,” he read off the programme while Nomura scanned the crowd for a clue to his reasoning for the venue. “Music by a Norwegian fellow.”

“Lovely,” she said coolly. “Why are we here? The old Order wasn’t so… theatrical.”

As the lights dimmed and the performance began, Otto smiled, eyes luminescing just faintly. “My dear, the Order has always had a certain flair for drama. We must, to be what we are. And I must admit, I quite enjoy the opera.” He gave a self-indulgent chuckle.

Nomura narrowed her eyes. “What is it that we are, whisper-man?”

The affable human persona dropped just a smidge. His smile shifted in the stagelights, just slightly down and to the left of human. “Whatever we need to be. The Order is under new management, _Fräulein_ Nomura. Events are in motion. Soon, very soon, we will have need of you. You must be prepared. But for now, please enjoy the show. Really, I have heard wonderful things.”

It took everything in Nomura to remind herself that she still had no real idea where in the pecking order this toothy abyss-worm sat. It might be dangerous to slight him. She was, relatively speaking, still young. She subsided and eased her attention onto the stage.

Once it was there, she forgot why she had been fighting it. She’d heard of this opera but never been human at the right time in the right place to see it. Now she sat transfixed in the dark with burning eyes, oblivious to the Whisper-man. Her paper programme twisted to confetti in her velvet-covered lap.

Shortly before the interval, Otto politely bowed out and took his leave. He murmured something about a prior engagement, a lady he absolutely couldn’t stand up. Nomura barely heard him.

At first she had sneered at this pitiful fool of a boy on stage. Idiot. Walking dessert. But the story drew her in. The music, swelling and dark in places and bright as spun gold in others, entangled her. Pulled her down and held her close to its dim, throbbing heart. It was like being back in the market—the living market, thriving, like the _recova_.

Nomura sat breathless at curtain close. She was unable to disentangle herself as quickly as the humans below. She didn’t stand to leave until the last of them had filtered out, and then on unsteady legs as though she had become baked in place by the sun. Exiting the theatre was like cracking free of an eggshell—clawing the sac and amniotic fluid from her eyes to unveil the world. Like a rebirth.

_To thine own self be true, and who cares what the world thinks?_

A New Age, she thought dizzily. A new Nomura.

To thyself be true—to hell with the world.

She ditched her temporary lodgings immediately: paid off her account with a handsome overhang, and ordered that her things to be boxed up and placed into storage the very next day. Otto would find her again eventually; he always did, that was how this worked. But until then, she was her own.

As soon as commerce began again in the morning, she pawned a jewel from her carry-along hoard, bought a new Cadillac, tourmaline pink. She left New York as soon as the paperwork was signed. As a specific point, she told the hotel to hold her mail but left no indication when she would be back or where she was going.

This continent was new ground to her, and she would explore it as she pleased. She drove slowly, meandering or speeding as whim took her, veering off on every detour that appealed, and fearing no one. She could be anyone. No one. She was no one.

Decades crawled by before the heartache of being rootless caught up. Every time it tried, she summoned the memory of the _ichiba_ and it faded for a while.

She made a point of visiting museums. Classical, contemporary. Pottery and dishware she understood. These had been with her from her earliest days. They held the value of a life in their curves, lines, and fractures. In their breaks and mendings. The story of a civilisation could be drawn from its crockery.

She savoured the stories. They were older than she, and rooted so firmly that no genocide or exile would ever rip them out. In a twisting, convoluted way, she was part of that legacy, if no other. Nothing and no one could take that away. Or leverage it to force her into anything. If for nothing else, she could respect humans for their tenacity. Collective longevity. No matter what the world threw at them, they pulled together and survived.

The world was well into the age of blue jeans and neon signs by the time she rolled into the last town. It felt to her that an eon had passed. This town was redolent of West Coast Americana and the eldritch twitching of the Heartstone beneath. And Nomura was tired.

This town had been pulling at her for two states. First a tweak, then a yank, and finally an incessant dragging strain. It wanted her here.

She had walked the Earth. She had seen. Surely enough time had elapsed that she could safely venture back below ground. Even before the pull began, she had sensed she would soon have had her fill of the aboveground. She’d known time was drawing short to visit one last town before the next descent; humans needed time to ferment into their next Age—to dream up new novelties and enticements to make walking among them worthwhile. The tourmaline Cadillac had been repainted twice; glittering green showed through the pink at several seams and cracks. (The Seventies had been a strange time above and below ground.)

By this time, she had converted the whole to a ritual:

First, the motel. A nap and a private, contemplative tea service with powder shipped from Uji. Then a stroll through town and a cup of coffee at a nicer café. It was necessary to drink the local brew in public venues; to Nomura’s mind, Americans had forfeited their last chance to learn tea correctly with Executive Order 9066.

Finally: the museum. The Story.

She entered the last museum to find it quiet. Heavy. There was a buzzing beneath the polished stone floor that she couldn’t put down to the mere presence of a Heartstone.

The museum itself was more than respectable for a town this size. Two level, she noted with weary approval; lofty interiors, stone floors, classical mouldings. A large flat space over the main chamber perfect for a colourful fresco. A curiously diverse collection. She made a mental note to speak to the curator if the opportunity presented.

It would be poetic, she thought in retrospect, to say that a tingling apprehension built in her as she forced herself through her customary spiral of the building—the tight, precise circles she had devised to be as thorough as possible.

But she approached the display case in the second-last room without premonition, only because it was the last cabinet on her route. A placard affixed to the side declared the contents to be treasures from the Edo Period, Japan. The largest item was a set of wooden panels painted with a coterie of nobles at a garden party. Above it, like a clouded sky reflected in water: a blue and white bowl veined with gold. Porcelain, not glass. Her mother’s.

Nomura Niko, Changeling, daughter, sat on a bench between the Edo case and the next until the sun stooped to fall across her feet. Beneath her heels, the vibrations became clearer the longer she sat and listened. It couldn’t be simply the Heartstone; in all her wanderings, she had never known a sensation like this. She had only heard whispers of it from the day Killahead fractured.

The telephone call she had received from the Janus Order four states back now made sense. It wasn’t sensible to believe they knew the significance of the bowl; no one tracked others’ history as closely as Changelings tracked themselves. Nobody except Otto, perhaps, would notice anything significant even about her name.

But there was work to be done here.

Before Nomura was a murderess, when things broke her mother would gather up the pieces and seal them back together with membranes of gold. She was careful to teach her daughter that there were limits to the technique. Certain things simply could not be mended. Certain materials would not take the bond.

In the Museum of Arcadia, Nomura Niko, tourist, crossed her ankles in knee-high boots that almost replicated the smoothness of her true legs and studied a display of relics from her first life. Her mother’s plate glinted in a slanting ray of sunlight.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” sighed a woman. The bench creaked as she sat beside Nomura. “The joining of two things to create an object stronger than either alone?”

Nomura looked sidelong over her glasses. This new Whisper-woman was a plump brunette, shorter than herself but with eyes almost as green as Nomura’s.

“It’s weak,” Nomura said blandly. “Broken.”

The woman’s smile was wide and white, and only a troll would know it for a nasty one. “And remade. We’re so glad you’ve arrived, Miss Nomura. The pieces are already on their way. Your job is to reassemble them. Together, they’re going to remake the world.”


End file.
